Laptops are something that has transformed our lives tremendously. In the digital age, a Laptop is nothing short of Swiss knife. You can take it anywhere and use it the way you want. But when all the Battery drains out and it becomes just a heavy stone is when it gets frustrating for many. You might be in the middle of finishing some important work, and seeing that low battery message appear when there is no socket around to charge your laptop can become nothing short of a nightmare. At this point, your ever loved laptop would frustrate you. Smartphones and tablets are no exception when it comes to the fast battery drain issue.

As soon as you recharge your laptop, that frustration would vanish in thin air. Anyhow, sooner or later the laptop battery would drain and take you close to that frustration zone again. These few tips will help you in increasing your laptop’s battery life.

1. Charge your laptop

Keep your laptop full of juice. By doing this your laptop will always be ready to serve your needs and you don’t have to worry about charging whenever you open your laptop. Having extra charging cables can also come in handy for you. If you are someone who love to travel, then having a charging cable at your workplace and in your bag can come in handy. You can also purchase one for residence if you work from home few times a week.

There is a laptop charging myth that has to be broken, which is overcharging will shorten your laptop’s battery life. Your laptop would also not catch fire and for surely will not explode even if you overcharge it. The lithium batteries that are used today stop charging after they are fully charged. If you handle your battery well, it will increase your power source’s useful lifespan.

2. Optimize the screen brightness

With the inception of LED displays, we are now experiencing a better picture quality and highly power efficient laptops. Previously used displays had CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent tube). But still, your laptop’s display causes the maximum percentage of battery drain. A Well optimized display can be of great use in increasing the battery life. It depends on the place where you would be using your laptop. If you are using it in too much light then high brightness is preferred while for dim lights low brightness can also work.

By changing a few settings, you can enjoy an enhanced battery life on computer. Just go to the control panel and then to hardware and sound then under power options just click on plan settings. Now you can change the Dim the display and Turn off the display time and make it few minutes, so that after those particular minutes of inactivity your laptop screen would get dim and after few more minutes your screen automatically turns off. From advanced power settings you can change the screen brightness when the laptop dims its lights.

3. Kill unwanted processes and apps

These are usually the hidden causes that drain your battery without you knowing it. Applications and processes that run in the background are the root of this issue. It is very common when you are working on a web browser with too many plugins, extensions and other add-ons.

Computers reduce their clock speed to execute the processes with minimal battery use, but this is not possible when such applications are running in the background. These applications that are running in the background would silently kill your battery. You can get a hint of such processes running in background if your fan starts speeding quite often even when you are working on low battery consuming applications.

You can get rid of those unnecessary processes by using the windows task manager. You can launch it by pressing alt + ctrl + del. There you can kill those applications and processes that suck too much of your battery. While working on a web browser, close all the instances.

4. Avoid resource hungry applications while on battery

There are highly battery consuming applications that you should try to avoid when working without your charger plugged in. Games and Image/video editing tools are examples for these. Trying to avoid unimportant downloads or update, while working without charger can also be very helpful. If you are disabling windows update then do remember to turn it on when your charging cable is plugged.

5. Turning off devices that are not needed

Turning off ports or devices that are not of any use can give you precious minutes of battery life although every laptop does not have this feature. Disabling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc. can be of help and you can also use the switches that many laptops have to turn these utilities on and off.

Don’t forget to take discs out of your disc drive when you are not using it, to avoid unnecessary drainage of battery. If you are having a back lit keyboard then turning it off when you are low on battery and no source of power near you, would save extra minutes from your battery.

You can also refer to our post on how to improve the battery performance of iPhone6. If you know of any more ways to increase a laptop’s battery life, share them with us.